Okay, folks, gather ’round. Today I’m gonna walk you through how I wrestled with building “Victor.” Not some grand, world-changing thing, mind you, just a little something I needed to get done.
The Starting Point: Drowning in Digital Dust
So, picture this: years and years of digital photos. Thousands. Tens of thousands, maybe? All dumped into folders with names like “Summer 201_OLD” or “Misc Pics_Copy.” A real mess. Finding anything was like digging for a needle in a digital haystack. I kept saying, “I’ll sort it out someday.” Yeah, right. Someday never comes, does it?
I’d tried off-the-shelf software, but nothing quite did what I wanted, or it was too bloated, or wanted a subscription. You know how it is. Sometimes, if you want something done right, or at least done your way, you gotta roll up your sleeves.
Enter Victor: The Grand Idea
That’s where the idea for “Victor” started. I didn’t even call it Victor at first, just “that photo sorter thingy.” The name Victor came later, mostly as a joke, like “Will this thing ever be victorious over my chaos?”
The plan was simple, or so I thought. I wanted a little tool that would:
- Scan a folder of photos.
- Read the date the photo was taken (from the file’s metadata, if it was there).
- Create new folders, nicely named like “YYYY-MM-MonthName”.
- Move the photos into these new, organized folders.
Sounds easy, eh? Famous last words.
Getting My Hands Dirty: The “Fun” Part
First off, I had to decide what to build it with. I poked around. Could’ve used Python, everyone says it’s great for scripts. Could’ve used something else. I ended up picking a language I was vaguely familiar with but hadn’t used in ages. Why? Maybe I like a bit of a challenge, or maybe I just had the compiler already installed. Who knows? Sometimes my reasons ain’t that deep.
So, I fired up my old text editor. Not one of those fancy IDEs that does everything for you. Just a plain editor. I like to feel the code, you know? Or maybe I’m just a bit old-fashioned.
The first step was just trying to list files in a directory. Took me a bit longer than I’d care to admit to get that working right, remembering all the specific commands and quirks. Then, reading that photo metadata, the EXIF data. Oh boy. That was a whole different can of worms. Some files had it, some didn’t. Some had it in weird formats. It felt like every photo decided to store its birthday in a unique, annoying way.
Lots of trial and error. I mean, a LOT. I’d write a bit, run it. It would crash. Or it would run but do something completely bonkers, like trying to create folders named “1970-01-January” for photos taken last year. Debugging was basically me staring at the screen, muttering to myself, and occasionally wanting to throw the computer out the window. Standard stuff, really.
Slowly, Slowly, It Took Shape
I remember spending a whole evening just trying to get the date formatting right. Stupid, simple date formatting. But it had to be perfect, otherwise, the whole sorting idea was useless. I got there in the end, fueled by sheer stubbornness and too much coffee.
Then came the part of actually moving files. That part made me nervous. What if my little Victor script went rogue and started deleting photos? Or worse, moved them to some digital black hole where they’d never be seen again? So, I added a “dry run” mode. That was probably the smartest thing I did. It would just print what it would do, without actually touching any files. I ran that dry run mode a hundred times, checking and re-checking the output.
I also made sure it wouldn’t overwrite files if two photos somehow ended up with the same name in the new folder. Instead, it would add a little “_1” or “_2” to the filename. Small details, but they save you headaches later.
Was Victor Victorious?
So, after, I dunno, a few weekends of tinkering, Victor was mostly… functional. I pointed it at a test folder with a few hundred mixed-up photos. Held my breath. Ran it (for real this time, no dry run).
And it… worked! Mostly. It sorted the photos into neat year-month folders. It was a beautiful sight, I tell ya. A little bit of order carved out of chaos. I felt pretty chuffed, not gonna lie.
Is Victor perfect? Nah. Not by a long shot. It’s clunky. It doesn’t have a fancy interface; it’s all command-line. If it hits a really weird file, it sometimes just gives up with a shrug (or an error message). And I still haven’t unleashed it on my entire photo collection. I’m still a bit scared to do that. What if it takes days? What if I missed some edge case?
But you know what? It was my little project. I built it. It does something useful for me, even if it’s rough around the edges. And that process, that fight to get it working, that’s the stuff you remember. It’s not always about the polished final product. Sometimes it’s just about the satisfaction of wrestling with a problem and, for a moment at least, feeling like you won. So yeah, maybe Victor was a little bit victorious after all.
